


Recursively Paradoxical

by syniram



Category: Me and AU (Podcast)
Genre: Anxiety, Fanfiction of Fanfiction, Gen, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 01:12:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29109858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syniram/pseuds/syniram
Summary: AUTHOR:Hm, do you think I could get away with putting 'Nervous Breakdown Thing' in the summary field? I think that sounds compelling.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	Recursively Paradoxical

**Author's Note:**

> CW: GAD. Unlabelled but there MDD. Blink-And-You’ll-Miss-It Implications of Suicide Ideation.
> 
> Spoilers through Me and AU Ep14: Pictures of Success.  
> Also, minor spoilers for On the Rise (Chapter 4). Nothing too plotty, but Kate borrows some of Ella’s world-building here. 
> 
> Note, for contextual framing, the very first scene here is Kate’s “must-huddle-together-for-warmth” fic teaser from Episode 6. “Hot Frog”, verbatim* (*okay, I omit like, one scene direction).
> 
> Shout out to WhatsNext, who, not only pinched in as beta for the first time I've asked in an unseemly number of years (and yeah, that shows), but also gets credit for being my Whitney, in so very many ways.

GARRETT  
So were we just... never gonna talk about it?

TONY  
Talk about what?

GARRETT  
Dude, really?

KATE  
Garrett shifted in the sleeping bag, trying to create enough space to gesture between the two of them. All he got for his trouble was a shock of icy cold air on the back of his neck, as his knuckles grazed Tony's chest. Not great.

TONY  
You're letting the wind in.

GARRETT  
Tony, I--

KATE  
He could do this. Deep breaths. How hard could it be, telling a guy you liked him after you'd already gotten him mostly undressed and into your one-person sleeping bag? Even if there was ice in the guy's hair and his lips were still a little blue.

GARRETT  
You gotta know, right? I mean, I think it's been pretty obvious I--

TONY  
Don't waste your time.

GARRETT  
\--like you.  
What?

TONY  
Shit, no, I -- I didn't -- I mean -- you shouldn't waste your time _on me._

#

_Friday, September 11, 5:24AM PST_  
_New private message from user hella-enchanted:_

Kate, I hope the unpacking is going well!

You're sharing an apartment with the same girl you roomed with last year, right? Jessica, I think you said? And that it was closer to campus than last year? Honestly, I've never really thought about the layout of Victoria before, so Google Maps is going to be a key reference for anything you tell me.

Nothing much of note here in Mississauga in the last couple of days. Well, my dad's decided he wants to start using smart technology, for some reason. That's new. It turns out that as much as I know about help manuals, I am not an electrician. I managed to talk him out of the particularly hazardous-sounding installations, but I'll probably need to keep an eye out to make sure my brother doesn't convince him it's a good idea to just DIY redo the whole house's wiring.

I know we've talked that finale to death, but I'm revisiting my thoughts on _that scene_ , and I want to run a theory past you, when you have time to chat. I can just send it along if you're not sure when you'd have time for a call, but I think it might be easier to lay it out live, if you are available. It's a bit, well, messy, still. Teaser: I was thinking about the homunculus again, and I Six-Degrees of Wikipedia'd my way straight to ideas about resurrection myths.

Hope to talk soon!  
-Ella

#

_Friday, September, 11 8:41AM PST_  
_Compose:  
To: hella-enchanted_

Okay, give me... a couple of days? Wednesday, maybe? Is five days too long to sit on your theories? (I'll totally understand if it is!) I swear, half of my professors think I should have read the first ten chapters over the summer, even though they didn't post the reading lists until two weeks ago. And, alright, so one of my classes is just titled "Horace," so it's not like the course syllabus is a surprise there, but you get my point. And I wasn't going to try to get ahead at reading the Satires if the prof was going to start us off on the Epistles, or with secondary materials for context. So not worth it.

You remembered mostly right. Jessica and I rooming together, but we're in the ground floor of one of the University townhouses this year; it's not an independent lease. We just had such a hassle last year working with our landlord, and we got lucky in the lottery, so, why not? It's definitely more convenient to be back on campus, instead of a bus-ride away.

I'm not that far into unpacking. But the suitcases are all safely tucked away in my room, where I'm the only person who's going to judge me for them, so good enough! Hah. Hah.

Classes are fine so far. Nothing too surprising, at this point, you know? And nothing feels like a bust, as far as interesting courses go. That said... Did you ever make the mistake of looking at the course listings in the first few days of classes? Like, "Hey, what else was there I could have taken?" It's kinda fun? In a slightly masochistic way. Like, usually there's nothing you can swap into without screwing over your CAPP report, and usually most classes already have a waiting list, but, when you're not looking for what classes check off the boxes you need to fill to graduate, you notice more, right? Like, there's a Germanic Studies class on fairy tales this semester, that's only offered every few years, that sounds even more cool now than it would have in Spring, because obviously Selkirk ate my brain. And I could even count it as a MEDI elective and change up my second semester course load, if only the time-slot didn't suck.

I'd better get back to my reading list, for a bit. Talk Wednesday, if you're free? I don't have any classes past 4pm.

#

_Friday, September 11, 11:45AM PST_

There were so many good things this past summer, with Selkirk, with Ella, even with Stuart at the coffee shop (even if mostly the coffee shop sucked balls), that... I didn't really notice? There were little things, I guess, signs. That feeling when Tony said, "What's the point?" and it resonated in my chest, but even then, even with that stupid vent post, I didn't... It didn't feel like something that was happening, you know?

Like. Everyone's had that one night they regret letting get out of hand, right? That night that starts out at a bar you didn't really want to go to, with sort-of-friends because "Come on, you have to come!", and you look around and think, "Well this is going to go horribly," and then three hours later you're trying not to puke on your shoes, and you look back, and yeah. That went horribly. But it's still a surprise, somehow? It still feels like you were supposed to figure it out somewhere between when creative-writing-workshop Raquel called for a round of tequila shots and... where the hell are you even? Whose bathroom is this? There must have been moments that night where you could have made better choices, but it all sort of got away from you, and looking back at the wreckage it's a miracle you're awake. You were supposed to take one of those outs.

You weren't supposed to be this much of a fuck-up.

Somewhere between that pit in my stomach at the end of my third year, and the entire summer, I was supposed to figure shit out. And I thought I had. I really thought that I'd just needed a break. A few months off, to reset, to get back in the groove. Because over the summer, I'd been okay. I didn't feel that bad most days. Any day. Not like last spring.

And then I was back on campus. And I felt so alone again.

It hit me then that summer vacation doesn't really work. Vacation doesn't really work. It's... it's a time-out. Not a hiatus. It's like pressing pause. And then you hit play again, and nothing changed. The music, the action picks up right where it left off and if anything that jolt – the sudden change from standing still to running – makes it worse because you don't remember what beat you're supposed to be on.

I got to campus, and I went back to class. It took a few days to sink in, what the feeling in my chest meant, and the almost-pressure just under my left ear, like nausea about to hit from nowhere. Like that moment after you wake up, but before you notice you're hungover, where you don't quite feed bad yet, but you desperately want to still be asleep.

And then, out of nowhere, in the middle of class. Lightbulb Moment! Surprise...! I looked around, and thought, 'I don't want to be here."

I didn't want to be here.

#

Tony woke up, freezing cold, and already feeling that drumbeat that meant he was overdue for some caffeine. That seemed unfair, because it was barely past dawn, and he was lying in a sleeping bag in the woods, which meant it'd be at least half an hour to get to his apartment or a café.

Always a little bit useless before that first cup of coffee, it took Tony longer than it should have to realize what was weird about the morning. Tony had woken up in the woods. Now, the waking up part, that was never gonna be weird: not until the curse killed him (and then it wouldn't matter). But, Tony wasn't going out of his way to go camping these days. For one, there was a war on, and for two, it was freaking _cold_. Why the hell was he in the woods, again? He and Garrett had been out checking into a report of "some sort of creepy dog-seal thing" near the lake. That was, yesterday? Presumably. And then...

He sat up, starting to unzip the sleeping bag. The crisp morning air helped jolt him awake, but crap, that was a bad move. Screw getting up: this sleeping bag wasn't even his, but he was keeping it for now.

Looking around, Tony took in his camping site. The small patch of empty woodland ground didn't seem quite large enough to call a clearing, but there had been space enough for one sleeping bag between the tangled tree-roots and fallen branches. The sloping hill that had looked like a recipe for a landslide last night had been a surprisingly good windbreak: the night probably would have been even worse without it.

Or maybe Garrett just ran hot.

Garrett was not in the clearing.

Tony should look for him, should get up and get dressed and figure out where he'd run off to.

But he was cold, still. And his clothes were draped over a log on the other side of the maybe-clearing. Worse, his jeans were that dark blue that meant damp, where they weren't streaked with grass and dirt.

Tony should probably look into cutting back on the coffee: he was getting stupidly slow in the mornings. Maybe he could blame the hypothermia?

Because Garrett had sworn up and down that bunyips hibernated, and it was probably just some nervous camper startled by a wolf. But they'd gone to the lake to make sure, because bunyips weren't always very discerning about sticking to eating the wildlife and not the hikers. They hadn't found anything, just some ambiguous tracks that Garrett said _could_ be their water spirit, but they were days old, and faded.

And then Tony had seen what looked like more, and went to check, and had fallen through the ice straight into the lake before Garrett could shout a warning.

And that was going to be another of those near-death moments his memory preserved with crystal-clarity, wasn't it? The panic, when the ice broke. Watching Garrett's face freeze as Tony slipped into the dark water. Trying to stumble out of the shallows, but being cold, and clumsy, and mostly just letting Garrett half-drag him through the reeds at the shore. Being manhandled out of his clothes, Garrett cussing up a storm to rival that time he'd lost his entire stash of weed out the truck window. (He'd pulled off onto the shoulder, stomped back down the highway, and sworn like a sailor when it became abundantly clear that an unsealed bag of cannabis thrown out of a vehicle at 80kph isn't the sort of thing you can just pick up again. Tony had been mildly impressed by the tirade, even as he laughed his ass off at the pouting look on Garrett's face).

And after Garrett had gotten him dry and bundled them both into the sleeping bag he kept strapped on his backpack, then... Tony remembered being uncomfortable more clearly than he remembered why. From the cold? From the shared-space? Garrett's general woodsy competence aside, this sleeping bag was clearly designed for someone shorter, right? And for one of them, clearly.

It was only when Garrett came back into the clearing, carrying the emergency duffel bag of clothes Tony would never mock him for keeping in his truck again, that he put together the piece of the night he'd been missing — had wanted to forget, really — what had made him uncomfortable enough that he'd wanted to get up and _run_. Because Garrett, in the early morning light, had that look again, like someone had taken something precious to him, tossed it out of a moving car, and made him watch. Tony wasn't laughing this time.

_So were we just... never gonna talk about it?_

And what he'd said. God, screw the bunyips. They could have the water. Tony was never going anywhere near that god-forsaken lake again, or rivers, or bridges. He might even swear off ponds and winter just to be safe. Move to the freaking Sahara, if only to make sure he never was so out of it that a conversation like that happened again. Christ. What he'd said after the Fae Queen's interrogation had been bad enough. He didn't need to try harder to convince Garrett he was a mess.

"Hey. How are you feeling?"

Tony couldn't tell if the careful inflection of the word ‘feeling' was real or just in his head. It didn't matter, though. It couldn't matter. "Fine," Tony said. "Fine. Just. Fine."

Garrett smiled, cautiously, like he would at an interview with some new mundane resident caught up in Selkirk's special brand of weird. "That's good. I, uh... I know they won't fit _well_ , but...-, figured you might like to borrow some clothes." He set the duffel down by the foot of the sleeping bag. "I'll be back in a few minutes. Want to check we didn't leave anything by the lakeshore before we head back to town."

"Good. That sounds... good."

Garrett left the clearing again, and Tony figured he might as well get moving, too. Borrowed or not, at least if he were dressed he'd feel less exposed when Garrett came back.

#

_Wednesday, September 16, 11:25AM PST_

For the longest time I didn't know what a panic attack felt like. And one of the shittiest things was that I knew what everyone told me they felt like. That your chest hurts, and you can't breathe, and you feel an impending sense of doom, and if you're not used to it, if it's not part of your normal? More often than not, you're going to freak out, and think that you're having a heart attack.

And, that's true. I can say that is a valid description of some anxiety attacks. But I had a lot of experiences, that, at the time, felt like they should have counted, but also didn't? Like. Because I didn't feel like I was dying, it felt less legitimate? That sounds so shitty, though. That I could have anxiety, bad anxiety, but because it didn't feel like it'd kill me, I didn't think it was worth complaining about.

Because I was fine. Everything was fine. I wasn't failing; my grades weren't great, but I wasn't you know, about to flunk out. I was still on track.

Sometimes, you can get into your head that you're supposed to be okay, and you almost are, so you just sort of learn how to fake the rest.

And that sounds dramatic, that sounds like I was willfully pretending to be okay. I was okay. I knew how to cope. How to distract myself. How to schedule classes to keep from being overwhelmed. How to block off times on the weekend to recharge. How to mitigate risk and make good choices and... Well, I'd learned to game my own brain.

Except at some point last year, it stopped working.

Nothing had changed, not really, it's not that... It's not that my anxiety suddenly got worse, or had new tricks. It's not that I had forgotten all of my coping strategies. It was just... harder. I don't know what it was. If I was more tired, or more stressed, or making shittier decisions in terms of health and exercise, and drinking on Friday nights with friends. Or if I just felt more alone.

But I felt more alone.

And. The thing about head-spaces like that? Well. It's like that jumping frog.

You turn up the heat, slowly enough, day over day, month over month, and you never notice there's a change. Moment to moment, it's imperceptible.

There's no instant where you fucked up, or everything went wrong. Everything is normal, right up until the morning you wake up and notice that the world is on fire and you're drowning.

And if you're lucky, when you notice, you still have the time to figure out how to jump out before you're boiled alive.

#

_Wednesday, September 16, 11:38AM PST_  
_Compose:  
To: hella-enchanted_

Hey. I hate to do this. I've got a last minute appointment today after classes. 4:30pm PST, so 7:30pm your time. I don't think it'll take too long. It should just be a bit of paperwork, I think? But not 100% sure I'll be up to talking after. Maybe we could just chat tonight and video call Friday?

I'll tell you more when I talk to you.  
-Kate

#

_Wednesday, September 16, 2:07PM PST_  
_Outgoing Voice Call to: Mom_

KATE  
Hi, Mom.

KATE'S MOM  
Kate? Good morning, darling! It's good to hear from you, if a bit surprising. Guess you've got a break between classes. What's up? Did you forget to pack something?

KATE  
No. I...

KATE'S MOM  
Is something wrong?

KATE  
Kind of? Maybe. Yes, I guess.  
I want to withdraw.

KATE'S MOM  
What?

KATE  
I don't think I want to be here.

KATE'S MOM  
I hear you, and I am listening. But I think I need you to explain that. Can you do that? Did something happen?

KATE  
No, nothing happened. Not like you're thinking. I just... I don't think being here is right, right now.

KATE'S MOM  
You're in your fourth year; you're so close to graduating. Why would you want you leave?

KATE  
Right now, I'm okay. I should say that. Right now I'm okay. But, I'm afraid I won't be, if I stay.

KATE'S MOM  
Okay. Okay. You have that emergency credit card, right? Don't worry about the airfare. Just let us know when and where to pick you up, alright? And if need be, we'll drive down to Kelowna, if you can't get a flight to Kamloops.  
Or, do you need me to come out there? You'll need to talk to the school, your advisors... Pack.

KATE  
I've got it, I think. I've already got an appointment this afternoon with the academic centre. Is... is this okay?

KATE'S MOM  
First and foremost, we want you safe. We'll figure the rest out.

#

The AC in Garrett's truck didn't work quite right. Tony didn't know why he thought he should have known this, but it bothered him he hadn't. It wasn't even that cold, honestly. It was a sunny morning now that they were out of the woods and heading back towards town. Tony didn't need the truck's heating to work. But it felt like it should be on, so he'd turned it on. And something started rattling deep in the engine when he'd touched the dial and every little while it started back up again. It was worse the higher he'd cranked the temperature, so he'd capitulated, and dropped it back to the lowest setting: so soft you couldn't feel it directly. But he didn't turn it off.

Garrett probably would have vetoed the heat on another day. In hindsight, it was almost definitely the rattling noise's fault that Tony had sweated his ass off in the truck cab all summer. Today, Garret winced a few times at the distressed noises from the AC compressor, but didn't complain.

Tony refused to feel guilty about it.

And then Garrett, the asshole, decided to get metaphorical.

"When it's off, I sort of forget that it's wearing out, you know? If I booked an appointment at Staedler's, I'd probably be sorted in a few days. Or, longer if they need to order in parts, I guess. I just haven't yet. Not because I can't afford it, or don't want to. Just. Sometimes if you get in the habit of avoiding something, so it doesn't make things worse, you just... forget you could actually make things better."

"Garrett." Tony warned, wishing he'd blasted the freaking heat, so at least his feet wouldn't be cold. The dread of being trapped in a car while Garrett decided to push was definitely chilling enough. Maybe the stupid dying compressor would have been too noisy for conversation.

"What? I'm being sympathetic that you're cold. Practically apologizing. You still look a bit like a drowned puppy, you know."

#

_Friday, September 18, 4:02PM PST_  
_Incoming Voice Call from: Whitney_

WHITNEY  
Hey, dweeb. I just got your text. Still free?

KATE  
Still free. When's your next class?

WHITNEY  
Advertising. 7pm. I've got some assignments I need to work on before dinner, but I'm not too busy I can't talk. And I mean, a text like that? "Call me if you have some time today." It sounded sort of ominous.

KATE  
Sorry about that.

WHITNEY  
It's fine! Probably my overactive imagination. You know how I am; it just worried me a bit. So! What's up?

KATE  
I'm gonna. I'm. Sorry. I still haven't figured out how to say this yet.

WHITNEY  
...Kate?

KATE  
I'm quitting. Withdrawing. Or taking a leave of absence, it's more or less the same thing. If I want, they'll let me come back, up to a year from now. But I dunno yet. If I'm coming back. If I want that.  
So, yeah. I'm going back to Kamloops. Flight's tonight. And, from there... I'll figure it out eventually, but right now the plan is to just not have a plan for a little while.

WHITNEY  
Kate, _what happened?_

KATE  
So, remember the night we got pizza, that week I was in Toronto? Well—

#

_Friday, September 18, 4:10PM PST_

I had told Whitney, 'You've got to try stuff.' Because if you stay in the same rut: if you do things just because it's the thing you're supposed to be doing, you're never going to be happy. You're never going to find the things that actually click, that make life fun.

If you're not enjoying what you're doing, if it's not your scene, 'Your kink is not my kink', you know? Why would you not stop, and find something you actually do like?

And at the time, I said that, and five minutes later, I was thinking, Yeah! You... you need to ask out Ella. And that, well. Okay. That went _poorly_ but good, after I swore her to secrecy about how painfully awkward I made it.

I kept circling back to that advice, though.

You know how sometimes you get those quotes in your head? The really good ones. The ones that just sort of sit, somewhere in your chest, and stay there?

Not 'cause they're, like, qualitatively the best lines; sometimes they're shit, sometimes they're just typical sci-fi, garbage dialogue. But said by the right character, in the right moment, where there's that pivotal change and you see someone – a character that you love – find their role.

Those sorts of quotes stick with me.

And in the month since Toronto, somehow, 'You've got to try stuff' has felt sort of the same. A... modus operandi. Or an anthem. Words to live by.

You've got to try stuff.

And I thought. I really thought that that's... I think that I thought that that was what I was doing. Go to university. Take some classes. Take more classes if you like those. Take that one course, because, everyone swears the professor's out-of-this-world. That's trying stuff, right? Everything about university is that sort of self-exploration.

I think I was wrong.

I hadn't been trying anything at all. I was just going through the motions.

And I wasn't sure I was ready, not really. I still felt like I needed time to catch my breath, before I put together some sort of picture of the future. But, looking at my suitcase, that I'd barely needed to repack, and at the empty dormitory bedroom, part of me was starting to think that I would get there.

#

_Friday, September 18, 5:41PM PST_  
_Outgoing Video Call to: Ella_

KATE  
Hey, you're online!

ELLA  
Kate? No offense, but you look kind of awful.

KATE  
That sounds about right.

ELLA  
Is everything–? What can I do?

KATE  
I don't have all that long, by the way. I've got to go at about 6pm. Your 9pm.  
I'll explain. If you want. But I don't want you to try and help. Not yet. So... instead could we just talk? About anything. I'd love to hear about your week. And your theory.

ELLA  
Alright. I can do that. It's not really a theory, at least not yet. More like a bunny? Maybe if we get a good enough teaser trailer I can build it into something that has a legitimate chance of being canon. Right now it's still very... incomplete. And I haven't figured out all the arguments yet. I was sort of waiting on your thoughts.

Firstly. I do respect the show's choice of using the term homunculus, because it's so... palatable as a generic term? I mean. It has enough of a basis in Western medical tradition that you can use the word and people will figure out what you mean without necessarily picking up any stronger religious connotations you would get if you borrowed any other culture's lore.

But I don't think it's amiss to look further than just Western European folk-tale lore while we try to figure out what to look forward to in season two. S1, we're looking too much at the incited war to really need a full-fledged back-story for why they choose that particular magic to start the infighting. In season two, though, that has the potential to matter as a follow-up plot-line.

And, I think it should. Likely, there will be some new big-bad. And I don't want to hazard guesses yet as to what that is. But as far as subplots go?

If we look at the morals and stereotypes which typically go hand-in-hand with that sort of creation-from-parts folk-tale, we tend to see patterns, right?

Like, Frankenstein is loaded with claims about the nature versus nurture duality: Victor's quest for knowledge drives him to playing God and doing something monstrous; while his creature's love of learning is the big thing which marks him as redeemable. No matter how many arguments there are for the creature as inherently flawed, the story shows that it's not the simple: that we're all capable of great evil, no matter who our creator is.

Or, golems, in Jewish traditions. Most of the myths and stories highlight hubris. You get a guy who makes himself the perfect guardian or soldier or envoy. But golems are mindless, and it's so very easy to issue the wrong instruction, or forget to qualify a command, and this will go wrong. The Sorcerer's Apprentice has very similar themes: Mickey Mouse and Yen Sid in Fantasia, if you ever saw that movie. The apprentice of a sorcerer tries to cheat at doing chores by enchanting a mop to be autonomous, but he doesn't have the skill, and the mop sort of goes overboard.

Or, um. Osiris, in Egyptian mythology. Set commits fratricide. Isis searches the world for a way to bring him back, and she does but only briefly; he becomes the god of the dead.

I'm not sure yet which angle I think makes the most sense. Some Inuit traditions actually might feel most right? There's a concept called a tupilaq that appears, in some variation in a few cultures. This is vastly simplified, but in some cultures, they're constructs of revenge. Homunculi built from bone and sinew and magic: always dangerous to unleash, even for the shaman. But I'd never want to appropriate that lore just because the general trends aren't so specific – and I wouldn't be able to do it justice anyways without a _lot_ of research.

I'm getting off-track.

Because, Kate, _Tony_.

Because while I'm pretty sure all of us are thinking, 'This means he's beaten the curse, right? ' we still don't really know what the curse was for or who cast it. Everyone dies by the time they're 31, but. Why? Maybe it's just so they're dead. We certainly don't have any indications that anyone else has ever come back. But. Tony did. And the verse has a canon instance of creating monsters from the dead for the sake of fulfilling a purpose.

Which means, if it plays well with their plans, not only do we have the obvious 'Who am I without that ticking clock? ' arc of Tony's, we also have the potential for someone to step out of the shadows as Tony's resurrector. And, there are precious few fairy-tales where, when someone comes back from the dead, there isn't something malicious left over, either as a byproduct or as an override in their code.

KATE  
Is this an appropriate time to confess that I've never actually read Frankenstein?

But. Yes. To all of that. I mean, I have no clue what it means, really. But, it has potential. We should draft some ideas, and then we should loop in Ray. She's definitely going to be able to help point us in the right directions for research.

So, you said, 'more like a bunny'? Are you thinking, of, you know, actually doing this? Because there's always Nano coming up, and it's not like you're going to get a new season for months, so might as well, right? Hint, hint?

ELLA  
Well, you don't think I'm crazy. Or, you just like me too much to say. So... Let's see what coherent fairy tales archetypes I can cross-reference before I forget how to research.

KATE  
Sounds like a plan!  
Oh, uh. Hey. I just looked at the clock.  
I think I have to go, now. I'll talk to you soon? And, thanks, for, you know, letting tonight just be about you.

ELLA  
Any time. Have a good rest of your night! And, let me know how you are when you can, okay?

KATE  
I will.

#

TONY  
Garrett, I.

GARRETT  
But really. We should talk about this.

TONY  
What's there to say? It's not... I'm not... I don't know how to be okay.

GARRETT  
Do you have to be?

TONY  
That's not. Th- Wh- Who even asks that kind of question? I can't. I can't ask you to put me back together.

GARRETT  
I'm not saying that I could.

TONY  
Then what are you saying?

GARRETT  
I'm saying that if you'll let me, I'll try to help.

TONY  
I don't know how to get help. I don't know what help _looks_ like. I don't know what I need.

GARRETT  
Tony. I'm saying: I'm here. I want to be here. So maybe we can figure it out together.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic makes no real attempt to pretend it's not autobiographical in origin.
> 
> And I think I've always wanted to write it. Because, eight years ago, when this was me, I'd have really appreciated the validation.
> 
> So, for all the kids like past!me: fairy tale endings don’t have to look like we thought they would. Yes, facing challenges head on is a good rhetoric, and being brave can help get you past the hurdles you face. But sometimes (though it should never be a decision undertaken lightly) getting out really is the best thing you can do for yourself, whether forever, or just for a spell.
> 
> Aside: For those of you who are of the appropriate age, 0/10 do not recommend asking Facebook to pull up your early college DMs. Unless you're looking to remember all the teenage life-crises you and your friends endured, in which case 10/10: I totally forgot a few.


End file.
